Faced with an increasingly difficult challenge in growing both average revenue per user (ARPU) and numbers of subscribers, network carriers are trying to develop a host of new products, services, and business models based on data services. One such service is call routing. While many advances have been made in the Value Added Services (VAS) domain in general, not much has been accomplished in the callee centric control area.
Callee-centric services include presence-based interactive communication services. In such services, the callee can publish, in real time, their presence information to callers (presence watchers) subscribing to the service. For example, a message can be generated and transmitted to the caller based on the callee's presence information, but this is limited in scope. Illustratively, existing presence systems provide only limited callee presence information to the caller in a response message. Furthermore, the callee is not able to control the content of missed call response messages according to different authorities or priorities granted to the caller by the callee. That is, current presence systems do not allow a callee to provide different presence information to different callers.
Within the telecommunications domain, presence holds promise for a class of new applications and value added services to drive data ARPU (as opposed to voice based ARPU). By definition, presence refers to a user's current status on a telecommunications network, and also optionally indicates the availability of a specific channel of communication. For example:                A status indicating that a person is logged into an instant messaging platform and is available to chat;        A status indicating that a person's phone is on and is not busy; or        A status indicating that a person is on his phone and talking (voice session active).        
A consolidated view of a person's presence (called a “presentity”) is depicted by a presence XML document that the presence server stores. Most people commonly associate presence with instant messaging. In terms of instant messaging, people have different levels of messages determining their availability. Many times an instant message client may have people listed as available, away, do not disturb, or off-line. However, instant messaging uses a limited context of presence in general. Under these circumstances, presence does not indicate a communication preference; it only describes the availability of the individual.
Accordingly, there exists a need in the art to overcome the deficiencies and limitations described hereinabove.